Photography has evolved throughout history, whether it be capturing moments and memories, creating visual art, helping scientific research or promoting various products.
Old images can be restored to colour
Photography has adapted to the modern age- scientific photography (including forensic) has never been such high quality, mass consumerism means advertising and promotion is consumed on a global basis and photography as an accessible art form is blooming with the introduction of smart phones and new hyper-quality cameras available to everyone.
Magnified image of an onion cell
Photography being used as an art form grew from technological developments where images are now able to be manipulated by photographers into ways that fit their artistic expressions. Modern photography is also influenced by photoshop, deception is easier to create which can be used for both benefits and disadvantages. Distrust in news sources, false advertising and the creation of photos where the viewer is deceived is a risk of photoshop as some people use photoshop in a harming way.
photoshopped image of an elephant
Studying photography is gaining knowledge about photographic elements and techniques. It is where you will learn how to take a “good” photo in a literal sense, with balanced light, a good composition, etc.
To practice photography means is creating art through application and creating good, interesting images. Practicing photography helps us to capture memories throughout life, recreating events, changing how people see things and becoming part of the crucial documentation of history.
I edited all my images in Lightroom, after organising them.
First shoot
Due to the lighting and weather conditions on the day, many of my images were quite overexposed – I combatted this in my editing by increasing g shadow and contrast as well as decreasing exposure.
3/4 shot
Full body shot
In this image, slightly different to the others, I added warmth and slight fade to increase the blue and yellow tones.
Headshot
2 people
Second Shoot
In this shoot I had difficulty with the screens in front of the tills – they added unwanted shadow to the image which made them quite tricky to edit – to combat this in the future I would maybe take the images from a different angle or in a different area.
Adding saturation and contrast to bring out the vibrant colours of the sign and items in the background.
Adding warmth and increasing contrast
Third Shoot
In this shoot, the same as the last, I had to trouble with the screen in front of the till. To combat this I tried to shoot slightly to the side of it. In my edits, I added contrast and warmth as well as saturation and vibrance to bring out the vibrant colours in the products inside the shop.
Still Life is the art of photographing inanimate objects which can be natural (flowers, food, plants, rocks, etc) or man-made (books, vases, glasses, jewellery) typically arranged in small groups. There are two types of still life photography: found still life and created still life. Found still life photographs are random collections of things that are arranged without any outside help, meaning you don’t move them to make your picture look the way you want it. Created still life photographs, on the other hand, are photographs of objects that have been arranged to look a certain way. The painting generally considered to be the first still life is a work by the Italian painter Jacopo de’Barbari painted 1504. The “golden age” of still-life painting occurred in the Lowlands during the 17th century.
Paintings with aspects of the natural world were so common in the Netherlands that, during the seventeenth century, the Dutch words stilleven and landschap were adopted into English as “still life” and “landscape.” Before the mid-1600s, though, the Dutch usually referred to pictures by their individual subjects such as “breakfast piece” or “winter snow scene.”
Found still life examples..
Created still life examples…
My still life photos
What did equipment did I use to take my photos?
Infinity curve
An infinity curve, also sometimes called an infinity cove, is used to create a stage with a plain, single-colour background. This approach serves several purposes. It’s popular with product photographers because it allows them to clearly define the subject of an image by remove the appearance of a background of any kind. The defining feature of an infinity curve is a lack of angles. Since an infinity curve doesn’t have any corners, shadows don’t gather in the background. The end result is a finished image where the subject appears to have been placed on plain white paper or a blank canvas.
Photo taken on the infinity curve – we used this for our photoshoot so it would bring the focus to the objects as the background is just plain white with no angles/corners.
Overhead setup
The overhead shot is a high angle shot almost directly (or literally directly) above the subject. It allows the viewer in on the action but still maintains character detail. It’s most commonly used in food photography to take photos/videos whilst cooking or preparing food.
We used an overhead setup during our photoshoot to capture a clearer photo and prevent us from moving the camera around.
While at Hamptonne, I saw several interesting perspectives from inside the historical buildings on the site and wanted to capture those perspectives.
A contact sheet of the images I took of interiors.
These are the unedited versions of my final interior images
I chose this image as a final image because I like the way shape and line is used in it: with the several rectangles that look as if they were stacked on top of each other, which creates a triangular shape. Because there are many (leading) lines in this picture, the focal point could be either the beam in the centre (with the horizontal beams acting as the leading lines) or the white triangle at the bottom of the image (with the cage bars pointing downwards). Colour in this image is fairly limited, being made up of mainly browns, however, I think this makes the image look more rural and thus effective. I like how the slate has been positioned behind the bars of wood as it gives them a nice pattern that you do not see at first glance.
I think this image is effective because of how the light creates a silhouette from the frame and cage on the window, as well as how that light creates a shadow off to the right and how the objects at the bottom are lit in a way which creates a clear shadow. I wanted to slightly enhance the intensity of the light so that the outside cannot be seen, I think this makes the image look more interesting as it makes the objects and reflection on the wall brighter. The focal point in this image is the window because of the light seeping through it. This image mainly makes use of yellows and browns, giving the image a warm tone. However, if I had the opportunity to re-take this image, I would stand back slightly to make it less cluttered.
I think this image is interesting because of the different shapes of the stairs, door, window and roof, as well as the low point of view which makes the room seem taller and manages to capture the stairs and roof in the same shot, which, to me, gives it a Hockney-esque look. The focal point is the window because it is the direct source of the lighting and is the brightest part of the image. The colour in this image mainly consists of blues from the window light and yellow/brown on the wooden parts like the door and roof. I like the image has both smooth (the wall) and rigid (the stairs and roof) sections, this in itself creates a contrast.
This image is similar to the second image on this post, however this image I think is laid out better because there is more space for the window to breathe. I like the warmth of the lighting coming through the window. The light shining on the window-sill creates a nice effect with the black surroundings, I think it is interesting how it suddenly stops when the sill ends. I think the shape of the window is interesting as it creates squares of light which emerge from the dark background, creating a harsh difference in tones.
I chose this as a final image because I like the way it is laid out and how there is a sense of space within it. When editing, I wanted to make the image slightly colder in tone and reduce the warmer colours’ saturation because I thought it would not only make the image stand out from the rest of the interior images, but also enhance the white of the pottery and grey of the beams. The focal point in this image is the closest beam because it has a bright colour and has leading lines from the meeting of the planks above it. I like the way colour turned out in the image, by making the image colder, the blue patterns on the pottery are more noticeable.
YourEnvironmental Portraits – show and discuss – critique
Select and edit a range of images from your still life photo-shoots and CREATIVELY ADAPT using cut-n-paste techniques and Adobe Photoshop
Look carefully at this blog post for ideas, research and theory
Create YOUR OWN 3 x blog post(s) that clearly shows your selection process and a range of final images from the objects
Remember to describe and explain your process, connecting your ideas to your artist references.
Use your study periods and time at home for independent study wisely…some experiments must be done out of school !
Remember when EXPORTING from Lightroom you must adjust the file size to 1000 pixels on the Long edge for “blog-friendly” images (JPEGS)
BUT…for editing and printing when EXPORTING from Lightroom you must adjust the file size to 4000 pixels on the Long edge for “high resolution” images (JPEGS)
Refer to THIS BLOG POST… for help and guidance in the studio
Ultimately , you are aiming to produce a range of high quality images that will be printed professionally. These are your final outcomes (Assessment Objective 4) You must add your high resolution files to the print folder…found here
M:\Departments\Photography\Students\Image Transfer\PRINTING Yr 12 Heritage Nov 2021
What you should be printing…
1 x Hamptonne Portrait
1 x Hamptonne object / equipment
1 x Hamptonne Building / landscape
1 x Heritage Still life (product table)
1 x Vanitas Still life (skulls, flowers etc)
1 x Photo-montage / cut-n-paste
1 x Walker Evans inspired / spliced object inspired by Darren Harvey-Regan
1 x Environmental Portrait
This week ensure your process looks like this…
Mood-board, definition and introduction (AO1)
Mind-map of ideas (AO1)
Artist References / Case Study (must include image analysis) (AO1)
Walker Evans was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans’s work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8×10-inch view camera. Evan’s style of work is social realism and and today his works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, among others. He is thought of as a pure documentary photographer as His precisely composed, intricately detailed, spare photographs insisted on their subject matter, and his impartial acceptance of his subjects made his work seem true and aesthetically pure–qualities that have been the goal of documentary photography ever since.
Examples of his work
Evans was inspired by his French cultural heroes, Evans set out to document the authentic, ordinary, and transitory details that he now saw in his homeland. It was in Fortune magazine, the publication founded in 1929 to cover “Industrial Civilization,” that Evans shared many of his cultural observations. He could not use a flash, because it would alert his subjects to the presence of the camera. In order to compensate for the lack of a flash, the shutter speed was slowed.
Darren Harvey-Reagan
Harvey-Regan first constructed a montage of Evans’s images to make new forms. He then sourced matching tools, cut them in half and re-joined various halves together, with the resulting physical objects being photographed to create his final work. The montaged tools become both beautiful and bizarre objects, in which a ratchet wrench is combined with a pair of pliers and a Mason’s trowel joined with a pair of scissors.
On initial viewing, one may consider the works to be surrealistic, but Harvey-Regan refers to the works as ‘phrasings’, “different versions of a visual question or proposition”. He further elaborates: “If you take, ‘what happens if’…” as the beginning of the exhibition’s question, then the works explore how that question ends, by using the elements of the photographic material, the image, and the original object and shuffling these three around, giving different emphasis to each, in which each has a different phrasing”.
Artist reference
I have included an artist reference below to demonstrate how I took inspiration from other artists to assist me in creating my experimentations using the still life object photographs, Hamptonne portraits and Hamptonne images. I have chosen to compare this image of Reagan’s as it was the best to recreate as so many of my images could be adapted just like this one.
The examples below were created using five images. The figure was cut out leaving an interesting negative shape and outlined. Other images could be slid underneath until connections and interesting compositions started to occur.
Photomontage
A photomontage is a collage constructed from photographs.
Historically, the technique has been used to make political statements and gained popularity in the early 20th century (World War 1-World War 2)
Artists such as Raoul Haussman , Hannah Hoch, John Heartfield employed cut-n-paste techniques as a form of propaganda…as did Soviet artists like Aleksander Rodchenko and El Lissitsky
Photomontage has its roots in Dadaism…which is closely related to Surrrealism
How to make a GIF in Photoshop 1. Create layer for each image 2. Window > timeline 3. Select > Create Frame Animation 4. Drop Menu > Make frames from Layers 5. Timeline > select Forever 6. File > Export > Save for Web Legacy > reduce image size to 720 x 720 pixels
then I imported them to light room and selected them using p and x and refined this using the staring system.
then I selected the images that were 4 or more stars and switched to develop mode in order to begin editing them. I adjusted the WB and the exposure to give the image more depth. To make my images feel like they were taken in the style of Ralph Morse.
original image and after editing
finally I cropped the image and adjusted the horizon.
final images
Ralph Morse comparison
image of Eartha Kitt by Ralf Morse
Although Ralph Morse manages to capture the job of his subject in the image I think I managed to give my portrait a similar feel through the angle and pose of the model. However the lighting in my image adds more of a dark feel unlike Morse’s where Eartha stands out compared to the dark background.
